Ward of the court at age eight and marginalized by five foster homes, she became a wanting teenager. Desires of the heart became like a burning fire shut up in her bones resulting in years of painful consequences. Romanticizing an idealistic goal for home and family, she learned the hard way that life is not always sunshine and peppermints. In her teens, she was a hired housemaid. As a young adult, she began to remove self-imposed barriers leading to a twenty-year career in law enforcement. Throughout years of adversity, abuse and fear, she sometimes lived in a world that felt like a big leaky boat, intimidated by the storms. Unable to graduate from high school with no place to call home, she married at seventeen and had her first child a year later. She languished in the wilderness of a barren desert with two children. In her twenties she became an impoverished single mother. She endured two failed marriages, one to a deserting husband and one to a dangerous psychopath. Yet, she found her strength and changed course for a life of productivity, security and independence. As life began to finally settle down for her, she was jolted by cancer which was followed by six recurrences over twenty-four years. At age seventy-six she began care-giving for her third husband of forty years, her childhood sweetheart, who suffered from alcoholism and Lewy Bodies Dementia. In 2013, after fifty-six years, God-ordained events led to finding a child she had given up for adoption. Her triumphs, tragedies, and mystifying events that tested her faith and convictions became a book at age eighty-seven. For a life cannot be fully determined until it is fully lived.